by
Bryant Frazer The first of two low-budget films that John
Carpenter wrote pseudonymously and directed in and around downtown Los
Angeles
in the late-1980s, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness
is one of the
creepiest movies ever made. Underrated at the time by critics who
called it
"cheesy" (Vincent Canby)1 and said
"[it] stinks"
(Richard Harrington), Prince of Darkness was
clearly made fast and on
the cheap, and it's roughly-crafted by Carpenter standards. Still, it's a
triumph
of mood. Filling out a mystery-of-the-ancient-artifact yarn with a
cosmic-horror
mythology, Prince of Darkness lives in a sweet
spot between religious
thriller and Satanic potboiler where science is the way, the truth, and
the
life, for better or worse.

Even if you've never seen Prince of
Darkness, there's a chance you've heard it: DJ Shadow samples the film's most
hair-raising
moment--a (recurring) dream
sequence in which a voice insists, "This is not a dream, not a
dream" as a shadowy figure emerges from the front door of a church
called
St. Godard's--on his landmark album "Endtroducing". The fuzzy images
ostensibly originate in a transmission beamed back in time on
faster-than-light
tachyon particles and into the unconscious minds of the Brotherhood of
Sleep,
an ancient sect inside the Catholic church that has guarded a
mysterious
cylindrical relic full of some kind of green, glowing liquid for
thousands of
years. The transmission is a warning of bad times to come and a plea
for help
from the future.

When the last member of the Brotherhood dies,
a curious priest named Father Loomis (Donald Pleasence) implores USC
quantum
physics professor Edward Birack (Victor Wong) to make sense of the
strange
canister. Birack recruits a small army of students to give up their
weekend and
live inside the church, using a battery of computer equipment to
monitor and
analyze the object. What they discover is a series of impossibilities.
A
2,000-year-old manuscript includes differential equations in the
original
Latin. The corrosion on the outside of the canister dates back 7
million years.
And, perhaps most disconcertingly, the artifact's elaborate mechanical
seal is
securely locked. From the inside. Meanwhile, a group of zombified homeless men
and women
(led by a stone-faced Alice Cooper) is preventing anyone from leaving the churchyard alive.

What's remarkable about the unfolding
mystery of Prince of Darkness is not just that
the characters are so
determined to rely on scientific inquiry in the face of an apparently
inexplicable menace. After all, that's fodder for any number of
supernatural
horror movies predicated on the failure of medicine and physical
science to
explain or properly address demonic possession, re-animated corpses,
the birth
of the Antichrist, etc. But these kids (like the scientists in John
Carpenter's The Thing, for example) are actually successful
in using their
brains to suss out what's going on.

Carpenter's approach to this stuff is
inspired partly by a broad-strokes interpretation of Christianity, but
also by
some reading on quantum mechanics. Ideas about matter and anti-matter
inspired
him to wonder: what if Christianity got it only partially right? What
if God
actually exists, but in a mirror-image version? More to the point, what
if the
omnipotent God isn't a good guy? One of the assembled grad
students,
Lisa (Ann Yen), is assigned to decode from the original Latin a
previously-untranslated palimpsest that is, oddly, full of numbers. It
tells
the story of an old-timey god who lived on Earth before human life
arose and
was somehow banished to a dark, negative universe--but not before
burying that
freaky canister somewhere in the Middle East. "Maybe he's Anti-God,"
muses Birack, "bringing darkness instead of light." The canister
contains the Anti-God's son, giving the film it's title. The
document
reveals that Christ was an alien visitor who came to warn humans of the
danger
the canister posed: that the Prince would eventually find a way to
bring his
father back from the dark realm. Helpless to deal with the threat, the
Brotherhood took notes on the incomprehensible science of the
thing, then
developed metaphors for evil that would keep Christianity strong until
mankind
developed the mathematical skills to make sense of the calculus and
banish the
Anti-God forever.

Prince of Darkness features a perfunctory
love story between impressively-moustachioed
Brian (Jameson Parker, from the '80s TV hit "Simon & Simon") and
winsome redhead Catherine (the late Lisa Blount, whose genre debut was
1981's Dead
& Buried), but the most emoting on screen is done by
Pleasence, whose
Father Loomis is stung by the betrayal he feels from his own church.
"Why
weren't we told the truth?" cries Loomis in a key conversation with
Birack, the priest chagrined before the scientist. "We had a
responsibility to warn the rest of the world. Only the corrupt are
listened to
now, and they tell us what we want to hear. And we believe it to be
divine
light." I think this sort of stuff gets Carpenter in trouble with
mainstream critics, who dismiss Pleasence's anguish as aromatic
ham-and-cheese
and the film's sentiment as ornamental cynicism, but there's nothing
superficial or opportunistic about it. Carpenter is nothing if not
auteur-consistent in his disdain for establishment thinking; in
Carpenter's
world, religion is politics, authority is earned through nothing more
than
repetition, and all of it is founded on secrets and lies.

In that vein, Carpenter has made better
films--including his next one, They Live, which
short-circuits this
picture's horror-movie metaphors entirely in favour of a
straightforward attack
on the Reaganite GOP. I'm not sure he's made any that are this wicked,
though.
Satan has a sense of humour, and he gets his jollies tormenting the
earnest
assembly of students. "Hello? Hello?" calls one of them from far below the church windows in a
distorted, possessed voice. "I've
got a
message for you, and you're not going to like it." And then, as his
body
erupts in a cascade of insects, he utters the deadpan kicker: "Pray for
death." A computer becomes another conduit for the beast to
communicate,
as Lisa falls into a data-entry trance at a keyboard, typing the words
"I
LIVE!" over and over so that they glow in eerie patterns on the
monochrome
screen. If the trope of the Asian girl as a mechanistic computer nerd
is a
little uncomfortable, so is the image of the African-American Calder
(Jessie
Lawrence Ferguson) ascending the church stairs while singing "Amazing
Grace." But why wouldn't the Devil
would seize on
stereotypes to better mock any troupe of multicultural Angelenos trying
to
figure out what makes him tick?

Some of this might have been push-back
against critics who claimed Carpenter's previous film, Big
Trouble in Little
China, trafficked in offensive Asian-American stereotypes
(despite all of
Carpenter's work at underscoring the incompetence and ineffectiveness
of its
Anglo protagonist). In Prince of Darkness,
Carpenter has the character
of Walter, played by Kurt Russell's Big Trouble
co-star Dennis Dun,
crack that Lisa "could pass for Asian" and make another genuinely
bad-taste Jewish-mother joke relying on "witch doctor" as a play on "rich doctor." Carpenter has said he got more than
his fill of bigotry growing up in Kentucky in the late-'50s and
early-'60s,
making him quite sensitive to racial issues. He does always seems
fascinated by
group dynamics, and communication across cultural gaps is a theme in Prince
of Darkness, as true believers shake hands with physicists,
a young
feminist's wannabe lover makes a jokey, tone-deaf claim to being a
"confirmed sexist," and the Anti-God Himself struggles to finally forge a human connection.

Cinematographer Gary Kibbe graduated from
camera operator on this film, the first of eight he would shoot for Carpenter.
(Presumably Carpenter could no longer afford Dean Cundey following the
expensive failure of Big Trouble in Little China.2) As much as any of
Carpenter's horror fare, Prince of Darkness
relies visually on the
spooky interplay of light and shadow, especially in the latter half,
and the
film is especially handsome considering a reported budget just north of
$3
million. Some of the imagery--like the exchanges of bodily fluids that
move the
Prince among his victims, or the bloody, sore-ridden make-up for Kelly
(Susan
Blanchard), the pretty blonde who's picked as the son's final vessel in
this
world--has made critics suggest this is an AIDS parable, although
the
metaphors for gestation and birth are even more direct. The climax
channels Cocteau, enlisting mirrors to function as portals between
worlds, and
we do see the Anti-God (well, his hand, anyway) groping His way
towards
the light. What rough beast slouches toward Little Tokyo, waiting to be
born?

The picture's biggest weakness is all of
the expository dialogue, which has a tendency to circle around and
around the
points Carpenter wants to make without ever quite landing them; I give
it a
pass because talkiness is part of the milieu (bull sessions is what
grad
students do, isn't it) and because it's part of the film's loose,
anything-goes
nature. Carpenter's secret scary weapon is sound design. The
relentless
synthesizer score he performs with frequent collaborator Alan Howarth
is among his best musical work3,
cranking up layers of mystery and menace
that help
propel Prince of Darkness through some slow
spots. The voice of the
"pray for death" zombie is treated in a way that was spectacularly
unnerving at the time (though a bit of the novelty has worn off with the
easy
availability of powerful digital audio tools), and the bed of static
that whips
around underneath the repeating mayday transmission gives the urgent,
authoritarian voice of the future a disturbing analog edge.

This is not a dream; it's the end of the world
as we know it. It has little to do with scripture, but Loomis declines
to fully
acknowledge the message. He holds the Biblical line to the end, quoting
from
Revelation and falling back on prayer as a last-ditch appeal for
strength in
the face of the horrors that confront him. The priest achieves a
backhanded
triumph in the end--one that leaves Brian stricken, and groping for his
own
idea of the light in the final scene--that allows Loomis to credit "the
grace of God" with an apparent victory over the powers of darkness.
Well,
Loomis's final sin may be hubris. The way Carpenter tells the story,
it's
pretty clear that the idea of an interventionist God is a long-standing
miscalculation. And here's what's terrifying about the
science-vs.-faith chasm:
religious men have dedicated body and soul to that very proposition.
While hard
science can be a cordial companion to enlightened faith, Carpenter sees
an
inescapable truth at the unhappy core of the relationship: If the
scientists
are right, and there is no deliverance from evil, no eternal light of
salvation
acting as a countervailing force against the yawning void at the end of
the
road, then the believers are in deep fucking trouble. Along with the
rest of
us.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
I saw Prince of Darkness for the
first time the way a lot of Carpenter fans saw it: on a grungy,
pan-and-scan
VHS tape. I wasn't crazy about it at first, but the dream transmission sure
stuck with me and the movie itself seemed more coherent on repeat
viewings. I
upgraded through the years, first to a letterboxed Japanese LaserDisc
that
improved the film immeasurably, given Carpenter's skills with 'scope framing, and
then to a snap-cased DVD from Image Entertainment that felt like a
gift from Heaven. Never, it seemed, would Prince of Darkness
look any better
outside of a movie theatre. Now we have Prince of
Darkness on
Blu-ray from Shout! division Scream Factory, and it looks terrific. The image is sharp enough that you can
clearly
see where it goes soft towards the outer edges of the anamorphic
lenses, as
well as make out some rack-focus effects that were lost in the video
murk on
DVD. The 2.35:1 Blu-ray has lost a sliver of information on each side
of the
frame compared to the DVD (which was mastered at an unlikely 2.47:1), yet the
anamorphic de-squeeze appears more geometrically accurate, and the
colours are both well-saturated and balanced significantly cooler compared to
the
earlier transfer, which now exhibits an unmistakably pinkish cast in
comparison. There is no troublesome evidence of edge-enhancement
techniques,
and while there is a fairly healthy layer of film grain here, I
suspect
some grain-reduction techniques have been employed. The video bitrate
is set to
an average of around 34 Mbps for the duration, but it dips and peaks
substantially as the level of detail warrants. Audio comes in two flavours: a 5.1
DTS-HD
MA remix and a 2.0 DTS-HD MA matrixed surround track that, presumably,
reflects
the original four-track Ultra-Stereo release. The 5.1 track has increased depth, particularly where the low end is concerned, and makes more
expansive use
of the surround channels for the musical score.

Extras are plentiful for a film of
this vintage and reputation. I especially enjoyed "Sympathy for the
Devil
with John Carpenter" (10 mins., HD), a new interview in which Carpenter
talks
form, comparing shooting and cutting styles to musical genres. "Movies
are
bebop now," he says. "They're all bebop." Touching on this
film's ambiguous and undeniably downbeat ending, he sounds a little
defeated.
"The audience doesn't really like that kind of stuff. They want a
little
hope, a little certainty, and they want to know that there's another
day,
[that] things will be better tomorrow. But I've always loved a little
doom and
gloom, as the Rolling Stones say. So
maybe it was my mood about the
movie business at the time."

"Hell on Earth with Alan Howarth"
(10 mins., HD) offers the most detailed technical discussion on the
disc, as
Carpenter's co-composer talks about the use of then-cutting-edge
instruments
like the Kurzweil K250, the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS, and the
E-mu
Systems Emulator II to create "little sandwiches of samples and
synths" for the score. This is as geeky as these things get, folks. Next
up
is "The Messenger with Robert Grasmere" (13 mins., HD), an interview
with the credited computer effects coordinator that Carpenter plucked
from the
film's crew to play the now-infamous "Hello? Hello?" guy. He talks
about being hand-picked for the role, and shows off some of the prosthetics
that
were used in his big scene. And Alice Cooper weighs in with "Alice at
the
Apocalypse with Alice Cooper" (9 mins., HD), in which he remembers
meeting
John Carpenter at Wrestlemania III in Detroit and explains that they
connected
through his manager, Shep Gordon, who became a producer on Prince
of Darkness,
They Live, Shocker, and The
People Under the Stairs.

An episode of Sean Clark's "Horror's
Hallowed Grounds" (14 mins., HD) covers the film's locations, from the
Mission Hills neighbourhood of Los Angeles to the USC campus to the
church, still standing just off East 1st Street, only a couple of blocks from City Hall. It now
houses the
Union Center for the Arts, featuring a theatre that has actually
screened Prince
of Darkness! (Now I know what I'm doing next time I rent a
car in Los
Angeles.) The disc's audio commentary dates back to a German DVD
release that
paired John Carpenter with actor Peter Jason, who had a supporting role
in Prince
of Darkness and then appeared in a slew of John Carpenter movies, concluding
with Ghosts of Mars. It's a reasonably
entertaining listen, and
Carpenter offers a glowing appraisal of Donald Pleasence, one of his
favourite
actors to work with. But if you're looking for some kind of explanation
of the themes, symbolism, or subtext of Prince of Darkness, you're not going to get it from
Carpenter--and especially not if Jason is in the same room with him.
Here's a
sample: "I'm not quite sure what it all means, but it sure was fun to
do."

There are no deleted scenes here, but there
is an odd alternate opening, in pan-and-scan (upconverted to 1080i), that is apparently used
for
television screenings and has some material that doesn't show up in the theatrical cut. At
around six and a half minutes in length, it dramatically reshuffles the
opening
sequences and, weirdly, implies that the whole story is Brian's dream.
I guess
that constitutes the "hope" Carpenter referred to, but there is no
indication that he had anything to do with this re-edit. The disc
also
includes an original trailer plus two radio spots (2:49 in total) and
(if you
go to the second menu page for extras and select the stylized cross
symbol on
the lower right) Carpenter's comments from a 25th anniversary
screening of the
film at Screamfest 2012 (12 mins., HD). The feature's audio is plagued by
static, perhaps explaining why it's hidden behind an Easter egg. The
audience
Q&A isn't too bad as these things go, though Carpenter's
disillusionment
with the biz is very much in evidence. Asked about his advice for young
filmmakers looking to make money from their work, Carpenter responds,
"Find a time machine and come back when I started."

There's also a decent still gallery that runs as
a video slideshow (at about five seconds per image) or lets you step
through
using the next-chapter button on the remote. It contains some nifty
international posters that I had never seen before. Speaking of
posters, as
usual, Scream Factory's packaging has reversible jacket art, so you can
choose
whether you want your copy adorned by the newly-commissioned Justin
Osbourn
cover illustration or the film's original key art. Does that count as
an extra?
Well, I appreciate it.

1.
Not only did Vincent Canby's original
review for THE NEW YORK TIMES misspell Carpenter's screenwriting
pseudonym
"Martin Quatermass," but Canby apparently didn't recognize the
obvious homage to the 1967 Hammer film Quatermass and the Pit and thus
blamed
poor "Mr. Quartermass (sic),"
rather than Carpenter, for overloading the
dialogue with "scientific references." To date, the error has not
been corrected. return

2.
For his own part, Carpenter--always a
DIY kind of guy--didn't respond well to the term "cinematographer."
"A lighting cameraman is what I need. I don't need a director of
photography," he told the DGA magazine in an interview that must have
made him hugely popular (or not) with the ASC. "I don't
need somebody to tell me what lens to use and where to put the camera.
I need
them to light the shot." return

3.
Writing music for his films isn't simply an ego trip for Carpenter. He learned enough about the violin, for instance, to play the
instrument in his high-school orchestra. He and fellow filmmaker-to-be
Tommy
Lee Wallace started an acoustic-guitar folk group called Tomorrow's
Children as
teenagers in 1965, and regrouped a year later with a psychedelic
cover
band, The Kaleidoscope. (Carpenter
played bass.) In the mid-1970s, with
Nick Castle, the pair formed The Coupe DeVilles--a
band you can see in a
tongue-in-cheek music video on the DVD and Blu-ray versions of Big
Trouble in Little China. return